Review: Senator Warren’s First Week

With the first week of the New Year completed, our federal government has already undergone two hefty points of contention, the resolution to the fiscal cliff and the inauguration of a new batch of representatives. My senator, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the outspoken mother of Occupy Wall Street and champion of socialism, is among them.

Recently she was asked by a reporter what income level defines the middle class. Warren asserted there was no number with which we could define the middle class, despite the reporters example that when writing a bill one would need to define different levels of income. She deftly avoided an answer, pointing rather to increased funding in education as a way to strengthen the middle class, whomever they are.

While it is true that all Americans, despite their income level, may define themselves as middle class, there must be statistical data to supplement the title, if only to understand how we can truly help strengthen the middle class. As a reporter from the National Review asserted, “If we offer more subsidies to all Americans of any income level who’d like to attend college, and to the colleges themselves (as Warren would surely like, rather than means-testing college loans and savings programs or spending less on university compensation), then that is actually unlikely to “strengthen America’s middle class.”’

Its curious if Warren would define herself as a member of the elusive middle class, despite her tax returns showing she earned nearly $1 million in two of the last four years. As champion of the working class, does Warren truly understand being a part of the middle class? Warren’s clear avoidance of any statistical measurement for defining the middle class is a heartbreaking foreshadow of what the future holds of Senator Warren for the next years to come. Warren, another voice to the drone of the Democratic liberals, is so staunchly opposed to providing any mathematical statistics that one has to wonder, is she prepared to “save the middle class”? Increased funding for education and presumably more Pell grants can only take a country so far. With a whopping unemployment rate nearing 8%, the country needs government officials who will be working to fix our current economic disaster. In Warren’s first week she has proven what was suspected all along, disillusionment with the working class and a blank slate of ideas on how to fix the economy. A quick Google search on “Elizabeth Warren’s plan to fix the economy” or “Elizabeth Warren on the fiscal cliff” brings up little to no results; the most promising refers to an interview done with PBS three years ago.

While its too late to reserve the votes of the many citizens who supported Warren, as Massachusetts prepares to enter its second special election in four years we can only ask that the citizens of the Commonwealth choose their next senator more wisely.

3 Comments

Although there is much debate on what exactly the “middle class” is (hence Ms. Warren’s understandable unwillingness to provide a definitive number) the general breakdown is as follows:

“Middle class is a broad category that captures the vast majority of Americans. It’s also controversial: Scholars and studies define sections of the middle class differently. But there are similarities between nearly all classifications:

The working class falls at the lowest end of the middle-class spectrum. These workers are employed in blue-collar industries or are paid by the hour. They typically have lower levels of education.

Next is the lower-middle class, which is primarily comprised of lower-level, white-collar workers. These workers typically have college educations, but lack the graduate degrees needed to advance to higher levels of employment. Income for these workers generally falls between $32,500 and $60,000.

Upper-middle-class workers typically have post-graduate degrees and work at high-level, white-collar positions. Household income for these workers is often above $100,000. According to the Census bureau, upper-middle-class, or professional class workers, earn enough to be in the top one-third of American incomes.”

So it seems that Ms. Warren is actually being prudent rather than derelict in her reply, and perhaps because of this obvious ambiguity of what exactly the “middle class” is means that we should try to define it better as a nation, rather than deride those who don’t provide the answer we want.

Ms. Jarvis, you claim to give elected officials the benefit of the doubt. Yet you continue to criticize Ms. Warren’s recent election, based on a hasty conclusion that Ms. Warren has been proved unable to help the majority of American taxpayers, aka, the ‘middle class.’

Ms. Jarvis, why are you continuing to ambush Ms. Warren here? The last I looked, we have a democracy, where we, the people, elect our representatives, and we then allow them to do the work we have elected them to do.

What American’s don’t do is fire them after only one week on the job – that’s nothing but an un-democratic, self-centered and uninformed position to take.

As I noted in response to another post of yours regarding this same subject, you’ve still provided no specific arguments against any of her stated positions, falling back instead (as most conservatives do) on attacking people you disagree with using the broad-brush smear tactics of platitudes (“Warren, another voice to the drone of the Democratic liberals”) and innuendo (“champion of socialism”) in an attempt to bolster your non-specific arguments.

You and your fellow conservatives should give our elected representatives the time needed to craft their ideas and to develop public policy stances – which, for conservatives and liberals alike does take more than one week. We can then all analyze some concrete examples of Ms. Warren’s (and others) ideas in order to make informed decisions that affect all of us.

There is another plus to this tactic of using a more educated and evidence based method for assessing our elected officials performance: You wouldn’t have to prematurely (and therefore ignorantly) ask “that the citizens of the Commonwealth choose their next senator more wisely.”

Given time, you would have actual data to base your decision on.

What we should do instead, and what I’d like to see the writers here at the College Conservative advocate for, is to have an actual dialog. Rather than have this constant rhetoric of talking points on each side which are used just to reinforce your own position – why not have a fact-based conversation that can move us all forward in this county?

The “original principal” missing in America today is the art of compromise that our Founding Fathers epitomized when they cooperatively created the Constitution, and conservatives en-masse need to start exercising the ability to work together with all American’s.

So I will ask again, Ms. Jarvis. Please, follow our Founding Father’s lead: become a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.